Public Paydays

City and county workers aren’t getting rich—but they’re doing better than their neighbors.

Mayor Sam Adams and other local leaders want to attract
renewed attention to growing economic disparities across the city
(“Equally Confused,” WW, Aug. 31, 2011).

There’s
one gap they may prefer not to dwell on: The relatively attractive
compensation of local public employees compared to the rest of us.

The median household income in Portland is roughly $47,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

New public data obtained by WW
show that the majority of city of Portland and Multnomah County
employees are doing better individually than most Portland households.

Records show the median annual pay for a city employee is $51,400; at the county, $53,600.

At least 772 city and
county employees make more than $100,000 a year, not counting benefits.
That’s about 6 percent of the county and city workforce combined.

While that won’t
exactly get them an invite to Davos, Aspen or even the Multnomah
Athletic Club, it does clearly place them among what’s left of the
city’s middle and upper-middle classes.

The numbers also
indicate that workers in some departments do better than those elsewhere
in the bureaucracy. The Portland Fire Bureau, for instance, pays
management and senior union workers better than even the
overtime-friendly Portland Police Bureau.

The pay figures for
these local government workers do not include their health benefits or
contributions to their Oregon Public Employees Retirement System
pensions.

The greatest
disparity these public pay numbers reveal may be how few Portlanders
could actually make the cut for good government jobs.

More
than half of Portlanders over 25 have not completed so much as an
associate’s degree—which tends to limit their earning potential,
according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis.

Better-paid public
employees tend to have advanced degrees (including M.D.s and J.D.s.) or
professional certifications (including police officers and
firefighters).

Last week, WW published the salary data for 9,000 city employees—and a table of the best-paid among them—at wweek.com/citypay.

This week, we publish the numbers on 4,600 county employees below.

Some words of
caution: The city and county report their numbers differently, so that
prevents a reliable apples-to-apples comparison. For instance, the
county’s salary list doesn’t tally each employee’s earned overtime; the
city’s does.

The county also
accounts separately for more than 1,150 on-call employees, who make
between $9.50 and $90 an hour (animal-care aide on one end, dentists on
the other).